Body Value
Me as Me.
And I'm okay with that.
Here is something that maybe people can relate to or maybe people can’t. I’m 53 years old. I spend A LOT of time taking care of my body. I go to Zumba. I run. I go to the gym. I do yoga. I try to eat right. I walk approximately 8 miles a day while at work to destress. I am sensitive to my age but even more sensitive to keeping my body as something of “value.”
What exactly does value mean? I am really struggling with is my personal relationship to my body. I was sexualized at a very young age. The earliest I remember is age 5. I have never understood my body outside of how it is reflected through others’ eyes. I never had "normal" sexual development, but most importantly I never even felt my body existed or had value unless someone else was ascribing value to it, whether through manipulative abuse, commodification, or in the ideal world of love.
When I was turned out on the streets at age fifteen, my body became a commodity. It’s only value was in its resale value. How much I could get for my body. The acts my body could perform for money. I had to keep my body attractive to be competitive in the market. This was the literal economic valuation of my body, and one that largely broke my understanding of a person, an individual, who occupies a body as a part of herself. To survive those years, I had to both sell my body and leave my body. If I occupied my body emotionally, I would have died. I had to leave it so I didn’t experience the pain and the horror. Yet, I went through the nuts and bolts existence of daily bodily maintenance.
After I got off the streets and started the long gruesome recovery process, I went through all kinds of tortuous and often ugly relationships with my body. Drug addiction. Alcoholism. Eating disorders. Engaging in relationships with no emotional connection other than two bodies. Feeling as if my body was a thing.
I finally tried to get “control” of my body through running. I began running nearly 27 years ago, and by and large running has become the time when I feel most connected to my body. I love running in the dark because 1) I disappear and 2) I become and essential me - just me and my body.
But when I exercise in public places, like the gym or at Zumba, I often have this strange question - what is the purpose? Why am I doing this if there will be no one to appreciate my body?
I have been blessed with an opportunity to feel my body truly appreciated through love, but again that left all the appreciation of my body through the eyes of another. I have never understood how to appreciate it if no one else is appreciating it. I haven’t been able to celebrate it on its own terms, just for me. That idea is an alien concept to me.
I recently talked to my living brother about this struggle. I asked, “Why do I even work so hard at taking care of my body and trying to be beautiful by some standard I don’t even understand unless it is reflected in the eyes of someone else?” He stated the obvious: "You should take care of your body and feel beautiful for yourself." This is a hard thing for me to learn, but it seems like the most important thing to learn.
It’s not just about MY LIFE. It’s about how our culture works. Of course, our most primal emotion is sexual. It is what perpetuates the species. So it makes sense that we would be driven to maintain our sexuality to maintain the species, but the species doesn’t maintain without two people. Then there is just the pressure all around us in every avenue of consumer culture that beauty is something that is quantified and measured. So maybe it’s a matter of moving past biology and past consumerism, and fully operating the arena of self, where I can have a relationship with my body just because it feels good to feel healthy and feels good to feel beautiful.
I was a Zumba the other night with my kiddo. I saw myself in the mirror and thought I was looking pretty good, and happy, and exuberant, and to quote a Zumba phrase “feeling my sexy.” But then I slumped into doubt. Why? To what end? Then I watched my daughter at Zumba. She was having a blast. She was BEAUTIFUL, and she was dancing and living completely in the moment in her body. Certainly she struggles with the pressures of body and beauty that come at her from all sides of media (and social media and the internet are insidious in that regard), but at the end of the day, she enjoys being beautiful for herself. She hasn't had a boyfriend yet. She just likes to feel beautiful in her eyes. She knows what she likes. She has crafted herself into a gorgeous early 60s French Cinema Movie Star and is drop dead gorgeous. And it makes her happy. She also enjoys being beautiful just junking around with no makeup and her comfy clothes. I thought I could learn something from her. I could learn how to accept my own skin and feel beautiful just for myself.
Like how she taught me that buying pretty underwear is fun because it’s nice to feel pretty underneath where no one else can see. That is profound on many levels.
I was recently thinking how relieved I am that by daughter is seventeen and has now gotten through two of the worst years of my life (15 and 16), and what a tremendous relief came for me with the passing of those years. For all her struggles (which have been many), she is loved, cared for, and has a mom who would do anything to help her.
Maybe now that I got her through those years, I can put the damage that was done to me in those years behind me, develop a new relationship with myself. One that doesn’t require constant validation through my body or otherwise.
I’m going to do that right now by making myself feel beautiful before I get to work on my Dead Rock Star Book which I must finish this weekend.
I can be beautiful inside and out, even with wrinkles, gray hair, and faded tattoos. Beauty comes in lots of different forms, and I don’t need someone else’s eyes or dollars to tell me I’m beautiful. I just need to feel it on its own terms.
Cheers.
K
Song of the day. M. Ward Hi-Fi for my favorite lines: "Why burn your bridges when you can blow your bridges up?" I guess I'm blowing up my relationship to my body, so I can start fresh.
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